The storage consisted of one Adaptec RAID 5805 with two Raidsets. The first RAIDset consisted of three Micron Crucial P300 100GB 6Gbps MTFDDAC100SAL-1N1AA in RAID 5. The LUN on top was made for all Zimbra VMs, which create quite a bit of disk I/O.

The second RAIDset consisted of three Western Digital WD1000FYPS 1TB in RAID 5. The LUN on top of these disks was used for the other VMs. The other VMs only require intensive disk I/O in the beginning of the test. During that time, the performance measurements are not used for our final results.

1. Do you still need lots of I/O slots now that we can consolidate a lot of gigabit Ethernets in Two 10GBe

2. Management: ok, a typical blade server can offer a bit more, but the typical remote management solutions that Supermicro now offers are not bad at all. We have been using them for several years now.

Can you elaborate what you expect from the management solution that you won't expect to see in a dense server? Reply

re: network consolidationNetwork consolidation comes at a cost premium. You can still argue that an IB QDR will give you better performance/bandwith, but a switch is $6k and other systems that don't have IB QDR built in, it's about $1k per NIC. Cables are at least $100 a piece.

If you can use it and justify the cost, sure. But GbE is cheap. REALLY REALLY cheap now that it's been in the consumer space for quite some time.

And there aren't too many cases when you might exceed GbE (even the Ansys guys suggest investing in better hardware rather than expensive interconnects). And that says a LOT.

re: managementI've never tried Supermicro's IMPI, but it looks to be pretty decent. Even if that doesn't work, you can also use 3rd party like logmein and that works quite well too! (Although not available for Linux, but there are Linux/UNIX options available out there as well).

Supermicro also has an even higher density version of this server (4x half-width, 1U DP blade node.)Reply

I have tried Supermicro IPMI, works nicely. I can power on/off the machine and let it boot from a .iso image I have on my laptop. This means that in case I have to boot from a rescue CD, then I do not even have to plug a CD drive into the machine. Everything can be done from my laptop, even when I am not in the office, or even the country.Reply

Using either the web interface on the IPMI chip itself, or the IPMIView software from SuperMicro, you get full keyboard, mouse, console redirection. Meaning, you can view the POST, BIOS, pre-boot, boot, and console of the system.

You can also configure the system to use a serial console, and configure the installed OS to use a serial console, and then connect to the serial console remotely using the ipmitool program.

The IPMI implementation in SuperMicro motherboards (at least the H8DG6/H8DGi series, which we use) is very nice. And stable. And useful. :)Reply

It starts to matter more when you're pouring on the VMs. With two sockets there, you're talking 16 cores, or 32 threads. That's the kind of machine that can handle a rather large number of VMs, and with only 128GB of RAM, that would be the limitation regarding how many VMs you could stick on there. For example, if you wanted to have a dedicated thread per VM, you're down to only 4GB per VM, which is kind of low for a server.Reply